The Story of Mixit

Our core values at EPiC are Empathy, Passion, Integrity and Community and we love living them as part of co-creating a deliberately different future.

Our New Zealand tribe are delighted to be working with Mixit as part of our Community Value – EPiC Heart. Mixit is a not-for-profit that uses the creative and performing arts to give positive skills and experiences to empower refugee, migrant and local youth from diverse backgrounds.

Like many NGOs, Mixit’s small, varied and busy team were challenged around their time, which impacted their ability to easily align and provide visibility around what each team member was working on. They also wanted to investigate new ways to work with each other in this more virtual world.

One of our Coaches, Antoinette Kesha, has been working with the Mixit team. Originally engaging with members of the Leadership team and agreeing to an experiment to help educate and trial ‘new ways of working’ with agility, in order to alleviate some of their current challenges.  To kick the team off, Antoinette led them through an inception workshop to create a shared understanding and alignment, which included:

• agreeing a social contract

• an introduction to the agile mindset and values

• setting of short-term objectives

• creation of a shared roadmap

• setting up of the teams first visual management board in Trello

• agreeing an operating rhythm to sync up and create opportunities to share learnings

Following the kick-off, our sync ups included stand-ups, check-ins and a retrospective with the team. Overall the team seemed to really enjoy the experience, especially the visual representation and team alignment being so straightforward, while appreciating the facilitation and support.

Their enthusiasm and adoption of collaboration tools, importantly the transparency and conversations it generated meant they were quickly ready to expand the use wider within the team.  This resulted in a second kick-off and more opportunity for alignment and transparency across the leadership team.

Shari Lett from Mixit shared, “Working with Antoinette from EPiC Agile has been a really wonderful experience. She listened to our organisation’s needs and offered us solutions that were tailored to our ways of working and the specific challenges we face. The knowledge we gained has benefitted the team immensely, and we’d like to extend a huge thanks to Antoinette and the EPiC crew for their support.” 

It’s been awesome working with the Mixit team, and we’re impressed by the speed in which they collaborated to agree improvements to their board and its use, including across different types of work – project as well as repeating and business as usual activities. Enabling the team to tell the story of the amount of concurrent work in progress, without it being an admin burden or creating unnecessary clutter, not easy across a range of different streams and tasks.  This is a great outcome for Mixit and the important work they do for our youth.

If you’d like to know more, reach out to us here: contact us

For more information on supporting Mixit visit: mixit.co.nz

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